All other green campaigns become futile without tackling the economic system and its ideological defenders. Economics is only dismal because there are not enough of us making it our own. Read on and become empowered!

22 January 2013

If, in response to the emerging detail on the horrors of the
attack on the Algerian gas-plant, you have found yourself asking ‘What
on earth were they doing in the desert?’ you would probably have moved rapidly
on to realising that they were guaranteeing the lifestyle to which you, and I,
have become accustomed. The idea of raiding the globe for resources, and using
the necessary amount of violence to ensure access, has been a commonplace to
the powerful nations of the world. It is this commonplace that the idea of a
bioregional economy seeks to challenge.

We need to understand our economy as a post-colonial economy
and, since Britain could be argued to have invented the most successful method
of colonial exploitation, it is my view that we have a particular
responsibility for identifying and challenging this view of how we undertake
the provisioning of our most basic resources: energy and food. The curious
informal partnership between the British state and the East India and other
trading companies enabled the massive expansion of markets for our goods and
source of the resources we need to make them and to feed our expanding
lifestyles.

Once we had found a method for controlling global trade and
profiting from it, the pressure to produce goods and services within our own
territory waned. In fact, British economists specifically argued that such a
strategy was misguided, partly as a result of their own experience but, perhaps
more importantly, to persuade other nations to join a trading system within
which Britain was already dominant. The spread of the market model, as an
economic reality and a mythological force, was essential to the extension of
the Great Powers of 18th and 19th century Europe. Adam Smith provided the myth
of ‘the bartering savage’ while Galton provided the parallel myth of the racial
superiority of the caucasian and ‘Ricardo had erected it into an axiom that the
most fertile land was settled first’ (Polanyi, 1944: 192), suggesting that what
was taken from the indigenous peoples of colonised lands could have been only
marginal lands. John Locke gave the jusification for enclosing land, writing that
putting a fence around land and improving it through agriculture gave settlers
a right to own the land.

Between them these mental constructs provided intellectual
cover for the adventures of the far from noble savages who travelled the world
seeking fame, resources and profit from the late 15th century onwards. This caused a fundamental change in our
attitude to geopolitics: the central role of foreign policy was now ensuring
access to resources rather than protecting the nation’s borders. As Polanyi has
it, ‘no people could forget that unless they owned their food and raw material
sources themselves or were certain of military access to them, neither sound
currency nor unassailable credit would rescue them from helplessness’ (Polanyi,
1944: 199).

This domination, based around an extending empire backed up
by financial and military power has made it seem entirely natural to us that
the resources of the world can belong to us in exchange for money. It is not
surprising, however, that those who live in those lands that are now occupied
by massive extraction plants and suffer the consequent pollution do not see
things this way. Years ago now I wrote an article called
‘Fascism or Bioregionalism’ but it might have rather been called ‘Colonialism
or Bioregionalism’. My commitment to a bioregional future is based around the
need to reduce carbon emissions and build stronger, more resilient communities.
But there is also a commitment derived from the Quaker peace testimony that
requires us to seek out the origin of all wars. In today’s world it is the
global supply chains that impose our greed on the land of others that are the
greatest source of conflicts present and future.

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